Final exam and project reports due by 5:30pm (but if you need an extension, write to me)

Goals of this course

This course is designed to give you the background you need to understand and critically evaluate phylogenetic analyses described in current primary literature, and to design appropriate phylogenetic analyses to address your own research questions.

Compared to many graduate courses, you will spend less time reading papers and more time using state-of-the-art software tools and doing homework assignments designed to ensure that you understand the output of the programs.

There is a confusing diversity of programs these days for performing phylogenetic analyses. We will concentrate on only a few so that you will know how to use these well by the end of the course.

Textbook

No textbook is required for this course, although you might find Joe Felsenstein's 2004 book "Inferring Phylogenies" (published by Sinauer) useful.

Labs

The laboratory section of this course consist of tutorials that you work through at your own pace using your own laptop computer. In some cases, you will use the UConn Bioinformatics Facility's computing cluster to perform analyses. Please contact Jeff Lary (486-5036) to get an account on the cluster at your earliest convenience.

Homeworks

Your grade will be based on a midterm exam, a final exam and a number of homework assignments, one of which will be assigned (nearly) every week. These homework assignments should be treated as if they were take-home, open-book exams. You may therefore consult with either me or the TA for the course, but not with fellow students when working on the homeworks.

Projects

In addition to homeworks, you will prepare a term paper to be due the last week of the course. There is a lot of flexibility in the nature of the term paper. If you have data of your own, you may decide to write a paper describing a phylogenetic analysis of these data, using appropriate methods learned during the course. If you are not yet at the stage of your graduate career where you have data of your own, you can do a thorough re-analysis of an existing data set. Finally, it is ok to simply write a review paper describing a particular topic in phylogenetics in depth. Please get my approval of your chosen topic before doing extensive work on your paper.